Jonathan and our Kindergartener, Maia, dropped me off about half a mile from the Skinner Butte Park community center where race registration was taking place, promising to meet me at the finish line. I walked past Spandex-clad runners doing warm-up sprints and tried not to yearn for speed. Ospreys wheeled over the Willamette River, hunting for fish. In previous years, I would have been so focused on the race, I wouldn’t have noticed them . . . or the woman ahead of me struggling to carry two 10-pound frozen turkeys.

“Need some help?”

She stopped, panting. “Don’t you want to get to the race?”

The I uttered something I’d never said in years of running timed events. “I’m not in a hurry.” She handed me a turkey.

I suppose it’s not a good sign when your copy of Good Housekeeping is stuck to the bathroom floor, covered in hair, toenail clippings, and dust bunnies, but by mid November I’d gotten so good at cooking I figured God and Martha (Stewart) would cut me some slack on the cleaning front.

We are going to have a small and motley Thanksgiving this year. Some years the gathering is slightly larger, but it’s still motley. This time there will be only a dozen or so of us.

Three will be very Catholicy Catholics, and a fourth will be a man who is just Catholic-ish. He loves Mary and wears scapulars from the Mission Gift Shop when under extreme stress, but he only goes to church every six weeks or so. When he arrives I’ll say, “Sinnerman!”

Robert Rummel-Hudson: Broken Thanks (posted at Support for Special Needs)

Some of us are in a place of acceptance, and others of us still shake our angry fists at the sky. Some of us embrace neurodiversity, while others fight to bring our kids some measure of the life that their unimpaired peers enjoy without so much as a thought. There are parents who are thankful for every day that their kids are alive, all too aware of how precious those days might be. Others of us are equally thankful for every day that we as their parents can be with them, ever mindful of our own mortality and the burning question, Who will take care of them when we’re gone?

For every disability parent who is thankful that their plane landed in Holland, there’s another of us with a lot of questions about why OUR plane landed in Mogadishu instead, or on Mars.

I’m thankful for kids who knock on the bathroom door and tell me a random science fact, who make up hilarious comics starring “Super Snake,” who have compassion, not only for other people, but for the earth and animals in ways that I often don’t, and with whom I can share a cup of coffee and writing woes.

That one day, we will all hold hands and D A N C E in heaven, like birds on trees, being moved by the warm magnolia breeze, like purple annuals and yellow perennials growing in the same garden of love.